Addiction is a beast, I am told. Perhaps I am addicted to coffee - I have given it up on occasion for a few months, like I have meat, pastas and breads, but never quit like people quit smoking or heroin. If it's my only vice, and it would seem to be, that is likely not so bad.
Pathology is something else. Some people say addiction is a disease, as in people who pathologically lie. What about pathological coffee drinking?
Stieg Larsson died early, at age 50, after climbing some stairs. To most in medicine, deaths like that are exculpatory and some people just have a bad heart. To cultural mullahs, though, it is always 'caused' by something they don't like - anyone who smoked, for example, died from smoking or high-fructose corn syrup will kill you sooner than bleached, white processed sugar, if your world view demands you believe that. What about coffee? Larsson drank a ton of it and smoked as well.
Larsson drank a lot of coffee, even for Swedes. His books...well, I don't get them but they are sure popular. To many Americans, they are thinly-veiled diatribes about violence against women in Sweden (seriously - "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo" in the English world was orginally, and still is, "Men Who Hate Women" in Sweden) and the first book contains, according to even people who like the books "he most boring opening 50 pages of any crime novel ever written" followed by "endless digressions and, much worse, his lumbering prose". Okay, but 30 million fans can't be wrong.
This piece is not about his books other than to note their non-stop coffee drinking along with the constant belief that all men want to rape and beat women in Sweden. It's about Larsson's potential coffee pathology hypothesis. And in Larsson style, this is meandering and vaguely nonsensical and won't resolve any central issue. Worse, it will leave lots of questions dangling.
Stieg Larsson with, naturally, coffee circa 1987. Per Jarl/Expo - SCANPIX, via Sipa Press
Two days ago, Eva Gabrielsson’s “‘There Are Things I Want You to Know’ About Stieg Larsson and Me”, written by his companion/girlfriend (and, according to one colleague, actually the author of the books, since, as Anders Hellberg put it, he was too bad a writer) discusses numerous things, but what struck David Kamp at the New York Times was confirmation of his 'pathological' coffee drinking. He had floated the idea earlier - that coffee may have killed him rather than genetics or laziness or smoking or neo-Nazis in Sweden.
Is there a coffee drinking disease? And if so, will it outlive Stieg Larsson's books the same way Lew Gehrig's Disease is better known by the public than ALS or his baseball achievements?
